Dominance War III
April 13, 2008 - Drawings, 3D Art, Games
So the deadline for Dominance War III submission passed yesterday, and this year I was able to finish something on time! Had to rush it quite a bit to get it done on time, was lots of little details and fine tuning I had to skip, but I’m still fairly pleased with the result, and feel like I learned plenty of stuff.
Here are my final submitted images, click on the images to see full resolution versions :
Concept sheet is a bit empty, didn’t have the courage to install the scanner on my new machine and scan in the few sketches I did for the design, had other stuff to finish instead.
Posted a bit of my workflow on Polycount, here.
Were some great entries this year, lots of nice stuff to see if you go around the participating forums.
Three new Photo-albums
November 26, 2007 - Games, Photography
So as promised, a quick post to upload some new photos.
Most of these are pretty old already now, but it took me a while to get around to editing them and stuff.
Newest album is of Pierrefonds Castle, a very nice castle about one hour to the north of Paris.
Second album is of La Rochelle (and a few from the Island of Ré, which isn’t far from there), a historical french seaport city. Some of the photos are taken in the cities famous aquarium.
Last photos are from Honfleur, another coastal french town, but much quieter, and known for it’s many art galleries, as it has inspired various famous artists. No aquarium in this town, but it has an impressive butterfly greenhouse, quite fun to walk around in it and have hundreds of different butterflies flying in your face.
Click on the thumbnails to see the different galleries.
Oh and yeah, I bought Super Mario Galaxy, have 45 stars at the moment, and loving it. =)
Still Alive, with Cake.
November 21, 2007 - Miscellaneous, Drawings, Games, Books
Hey! An update, yay!
Yeah so I haven’t written here since I started my last job, which I left a few weeks ago. It was a ~6 month internship at Montecristo, working on the expansion to the hack&slash RPG, Silverfall. I had a good time there, worked with many cool people, gained some worthwhile experience, and had some great games of Wolfenstein : Enemy Territory during lunch breaks, heh.
So now I’m looking around for proper employment in and around Paris, most likely in the game industry again, will see what I can find. If you’re an interesting paris game developer, don’t miss your chance to hire a promising young computer artist!
In my free time, I’ve been playing quite a bit (yes, I admit, probably a bit too much), mostly the brilliant Orange Box. All three games featured in it are awesome:
Half Life 2 episode 2 is just more quality Half Life experience, and left me really looking forward to the final episode.
Team Fortress 2 is quite simply the best game of 2007 (mind you, I haven’t played Mario Galaxy yet) and easily one of the best multiplayer games of all time, the visual and sound design are perfect, and so original, and the gameplay is just a blast.
And finally Portal, one of the first proper first person puzzle games, featuring unique gameplay and quite surprisingly, some of the best writing in a game I’ve seen in long time. Couldn’t help drawing a quick bit of Portal related art. If you haven’t played it, it probably won’t make much sense, but worry not, for there is cake!
Still working on some various projects, progress on my school movie has slowed down a bit, but should be picking up again soon, gotta get it done for early next year. Otherwise, I’ve been finishing up various 3D models, will hopefully post them here shortly.
I stopped updating the “Currently Reading” and “Currently Listening” things on the side of the site, can’t really be bothered taking care of those, but I’ve still been reading alot, wasted an afternoon filling up a virtual library on LibraryThing, you can see my books here.
Probably gonna post some new photography albums before the end of the week, so come by again in a few days (instead of a few months).
Still Alive, 3D Work in Progress…
May 1, 2007 - Miscellaneous, 3D Art, Music
Ouch, haven’t updated in months! And I don’t even have any proper excuses! Been working on various projects (and yeah, also wasting time playing some random games), but without anything to show I just had no real reason to update really.
So anyways, school project is still going ok, although a bit slow in between school sessions. Pre-production is pretty much completely done, as is the animatic, and our two characters are modeled and rigged, so we should start animating soon. Rendering is still giving us some trouble, we are really looking into various non-photorealistic rendering techniques, but most of it is pretty hard to pull off convincingly… Hopefully once we have it figured out, we’ll be able to show a teaser or something.
Been messing around with a quick model these last few days, to get the hang of Mudbox and normal map generation, and also give Topogun a try, an interesting new software being developed specifically for retopology. He’s not quite done yet, still have to work on the textures, and then do a rapid setup and maybe some simple environment, will see how that goes. Here’s a preview image showing off the model with and without the normal map:
Still working on that alien chick model a bit, and also on my final Quake singleplayer stuff I’ve had going for the last 6 years (hehe), dunno when I’ll be able to finish it.
Been to a few more concerts since the last update, saw Lacuna Coil, and the Cinematic Orchestra, won’t go into details, but both concerts where highly enjoyable.
That’s it for now, starting a new job tomorrow in a game dev company, up until I finish school, hope it goes ok!
PS: czg asked me to blog about my cookies, so here, check out my delicious cookies!
Lost Update - Movies, Games and more…
November 24, 2006 - Miscellaneous, 3D Art, Games, Music, Movies
Ack, ok, so I haven’t been updating much these last few weeks… months actually, been pretty busy with school stuff, and work.
My school project (a 2 minute animated short movie) is going forward ok, lots of work to do on it, hopefully I’ll be able to show some stuff in a few months.
I’ve been working on some weird alien space chick model when I can find the time, not really sure if I’ll get around to finishing her, but here are a few shots anyways, just to prove that I haven’t been completely unproductive: 1 2 3 4 5
Been going to the movies more often these last weeks, saw some nice films:
Pan’s Labyrinth, this movie is a fairy tale for adults, dark and brutal, yet completely enchanting. The visuals are great, and the main character, played brilliantly by a young Spanish girl, is just great.
Children of Men, the premise of a world where everyone is sterile sounded a bit cheesy, but this film blew me away. It’s a very dark and realistic film, that in the end, isn’t always so distant from our own world. It’s very well produced, some of the images and camera work were incredible.
Little Miss Sunshine, more humorous than the two previous movies, this tells the story of some crazy American family on a road trip. That doesn’t sound too interesting, but all the actors are excellent, I declare it my number one feel-good movie of the end of the year.
Also went to see Borat, and it was just as stupid as I had expected!
Next movies I plan to see are The Host, Babel, and The Prestige, gah, too many interesting films to see these days…
Been wasting time playing more games recently:
Played lots of Nintendo DS Games, won’t go into detail on all of them, but I most enjoyed Advance Wars 2 (which is the reason I bought the console in the first place), Castlevania Aria of Sorrow (hard to find good platform games these days, looking forward to Portrait of Ruin) and the brilliant Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan! and it’s not quite as charming, but still good americanized cousin Elite Beat Agents.
Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, a nice first person fantasy game with good visuals and some great locations. The combat is quite fun and there are always lots of different ways to approach it. The single player game was very enjoyable, the story is interesting enough and pulled off quite nicely. Tried the multiplayer a bit, and it’s ok, but not something I’d play more than a few games of.
I want Wii and Zelda Twilight Princess now please. =(
Summer in Japan
September 4, 2006 - Photography
Well, as some of you seem to have already seen, I’ve put up some photo albums of our summer trip to Japan, and am slowly adding comments to the various photos.
It was my second time in Japan, and I still hope to go back there. Seems like there is always more things to see and do, and life as a tourist there is just so pleasant the people generally being so nice and friendly. They often go out of their way to help you out, even some old mute guy who noticed us examining our map, showed us where we were supposed to go.
We spent two weeks there this time, and stayed in Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka, doing some day trips to places like Himeji and Nikko.
Hope you enjoy the photos!
Back from Japan + Massive Attack concert
July 30, 2006 - Miscellaneous, Music
Well, I’m back from my two week vacation in Japan with my girlfriend!
Once again it was utterly awesome, so many great things to do, see, and eat! Weather was nice and hot, usually around 35°C, coming back to Paris under the rain with sub-20°C temperatures outside was a bit depressing to say the least… I took about 1000 photos, which I’m slowly organising and cleaning up, I will of course post a selection in my gallery as soon as I’m ready, accompanied with some more ramblings about our trip, so stay tuned.
In other news, I saw Massive Attack yesterday night.
I’ve always wanted to see them live, as I love their music, but have to admit I wasn’t really sure what to expect, for I had never heard nor seen any of their live material. Well apart from two idiots who were pretty much having sex in public right in front of me during the first part of the concert, it was friggin amazing! Quite dark and brooding, but also very powerful stuff, I was pleasantly surprised to see so much of the band was present (the core band was of course there, but also lots of their other usual singers, like Horace Andy, Shara Nelson and Elizabeth Fraser).
They played a really nice selection of songs, with plenty of variations from the studio versions; Inertia Creeps and Unfinished Sympathies were incredible!
Tool, Sigur Rós, and other stuff…
July 7, 2006 - Miscellaneous, Music
Saw some nice concerts recently. First of all Tool last week, which was, as I expected, incredibly powerful, although a tad short. All the songs were great, especially some of the ones from the new album 10,000 Days, and Maynard was impressive, as usual (despite still coming off as a bit of an obnoxious bastard, hehe, but at least he’s a funny and talented obnoxious bastard). Didn’t quite live up to the incredible A Perfect Circle concert I saw a few years back when they toured for Thirteenth Step, but it was still a fantastic concert.
In a completely different genre, yesterday I went to see Sigur Rós. For those of you who aren’t familiar with their stuff, it’s some crazy icelandish post-rockish weirdo music. Was great, played some of my favorite songs so I was happy, had some good synergy going with all the people on stage (must have been about 10-15 people what with the violins and wind instruments).
There was a fun first part, before Sigur Rós, a small band called Amina composed of 4 girls playing various instruments (they’d move around and change instruments during pieces) ranging from violins and xylophones to strange bells and saws, was quite fun. They have an EP called Animamina out that’s worth checking out if you’re into weird soft instrumental music.
In other news, I have too much work to do, and I should definatly be doing it instead of posting stuff on my blog!
Also, I got my plane tickets for Japan, so if all goes well, I’ll be running around Japan for 2 weeks at the end of august with my girlfriend ♥, yay can’t wait!
Oh and congrats to the Discovery crew for getting up into space again.
Punk Gecko
June 26, 2006 - 3D Art
Finished the low poly model I’ve been working on for the last 2 weeks for school. The assignment was to create a low poly animal model (under 5000 triangles) with a diffuse map, specular map, and a normal map, I ended up doing some crazy punk gecko…
I’ve also rendered a little turnaround video of the model, right here (divx5 codec).
Normal maps were generated with Zbrush’s handy ZMapper plugin. Was my first time really using Zbrush, quite a brainfuck when you start using it, the interface is completely unconventional, but once you get the hang of it, it’s a really powerful tool, and I plan on using it more in the very near future.
Now if you don’t mind, I’ll go waste some time playing a bit more of the multiplayer Prey demo.
Some Schoolwork Drawings…
June 21, 2006 - Drawings
Finally got around to putting some of the design drawings I’ve had to make for school in my gallery. I’m not really satisfied with all of them, most of the time I have to rush them to finish on time (too much work to do days! And my computer’s mother-board frying isn’t helping… I need a vacation, a long one preferably).
As you can see, they’re all characters inspired by different movie universes, not always very successfully. Quite a change from my usual drawings I guess, and thus fairly tricky for me (too used to my style), but it’s quite an interesting and rewarding exercise to do, especially since our teacher knows his stuff quite well (he’s quite demanding though, and very hard to please, but I guess those are both good things).
Working on some normal mapped low poly punk gecko for my 3D class these days, hopefully he’ll be in a presentable state soon enough, at which time I’ll post some pics here.
Kiyomizu Pagoda Reproduction
May 26, 2006 - 3D Art
Ok, so this reproduction of the Kiyomizu pagoda I’ve been working on for school is finally in a showable state. It could still use quite a bit of detail work, and some proper textures (only some quick procedural stuff on there at the moment) but I have plenty more work to do for school next week already, so I’ll leave it as it is for now.
I built it all with 3dsmax, using Vray for rendering. There are some more renders viewable here.
The photo in the background is one I took in the actual mountains surrounding the true Kiyomizu temple while in Japan, you can see some real pics of the temple in my Japan photo album.
This was my first environment made in 3dsmax, it was very different from my level design experience, the software is completely different and it took me a while to stop trying to do like I did for building my quake maps. But now that I’m a bit more used to it, I’m quite enjoying 3dsmax, I’m even having fun tweaking all the complex rendering settings around, something I was sure I’d hate (still have a shit load to learn where rendering is concerned though). I’m looking forward to doing some more personal (and most likely more sci-fi-ish) environments later on!
Within a Deep Forest
May 20, 2006 - Games
Just discovered this fun little platform game called Within a Deep Forest while visiting Independent Gaming. You play as a ball, bouncing around in a mysterious forest and other various locations, trying to stop an evil scientist from destroying the world (oh no!). As you advance in the game, you come across many creatues, that alow you to change the material of your ball, making it react in new ways, like bouncing higher, or being resistant to cold, etc.
The game isn’t too difficult once you’ve mastered the rather original gameplay, even though one or two areas got me quite frustrated (GAH, stupid laser room in underwater lab!), but not enough that you’ll stop playing (I played straight through from beginning to end, took me two or three hours). I was pleasantly surprised by the atmosphere in a few of the areas, some were really immersive and mysterious, with nice ambiant music to help pull it off.
So anyways, highly recommended if you enjoy platform games, or just want something a bit different than all those silly 3D games kids are playing these days.
